It has been said that Mexico is in “societal freefall.” The difficulties are enormous but at the same time there is light for those who can see.
On our recent trip to Mexico City, Cuernavaca and Irapuato I noticed an increasing number of young people who are desperately hungry for more of God. At the same time they are bored stiff with attending the endless succession of church meetings where they are required to sit in neat rows and listen to someone give a talk. They are tired of the worn-out clichés of preachers and singers in silk suits and pearly teeth who do the miracles on TV while the people say, “WOW” and send in their money. These young people want more. They want participatory Christianity. They want the New Testament in action. They want to do the miracles themselves but not like the TV preachers who glorify themselves, but in ways that bring glory only to Jesus. They are content to stay hidden. All these factors together are extremely encouraging to me. My studies of revival movements reveal that almost all revivals begin with a small group of young people who are dissatisfied with their present state of spirituality and begin seeking more of God in prayer, meditation and even pilgrimage. When they become desperate enough to honestly put everything they have and everything they are on the altar of God and hold nothing back, then, He answers with fire.
Mary and I visited Wales last fall, where revival broke out spontaneously in various communities of this tiny country in 1904. Most notable was Loughor where a small group of young people passed through this same scenario I have described above. The leader of the revival Evan Roberts worked in a coal mine from the age of 11 until he was 24 years old when the revival broke out. There is no record of anything that happened during that time but I am sure he was saying to himself, “I don’t want to do this the rest of my life, I want something more!” At the same time Evan caught a vision of Jesus that was so big, so overpowering, and so majestic that he couldn’t get it out of his spirit if he tried. Christ became so big in him that He overpowered everything else. All of Evan’s personal dreams, visions, desires became as the apostle Paul described them, as so much “dung.”
Roberts reported:
“For a long time I was much troubled in my soul and my heart by thinking over the failure of Christianity…but one night, after I had been in great distress praying about this, I went to sleep and at one o’clock in the morning suddenly I was waked up out of my sleep and I found myself with unspeakable joy and awe in the very presence of the almighty God. And for the space of four hours I was privileged to speak face to face with him as a man speaks face to face with a friend. At five o’clock it seemed to me as if I again returned to earth… And it was not only that morning but every morning for three or four months…I felt it, and it seemed to change all my nature, and I saw things in a different light, and I knew that God was going to work in the land, and not this land only, but in all the world. [1]
Then one night as another young man, Seth Joshua, preached at Blaenannerch, the Holy Spirit was moving and Evan cried out over and over, “Plyg fi O Arglwydd” which is Welsh for “Bend me O Lord.” From that point Evan and his friends launched out on a preaching mission all over Wales and more than 100 thousand souls came to Christ in the following year.
Roberts’ four point message was:
- Confess all known sin, receiving forgiveness through Jesus Christ
- Remove anything in your life that you are in doubt or feel unsure about
- Be ready to obey the Holy Spirit instantly
- Publicly confess the Lord Jesus Christ
Another example that is more pertinent to our consideration at this point is the first wave of revival in Argentina (1950) I have been privileged to have extensive personal contact with Hugo Contreras, one of the starters of this revival. Hugo, who was 18 years old at the time, his brother, Celsio and two other young men attended a Bible school run by a major American Pentecostal denomination. These young men began to sense an incredible hunger for God and began to spend time outside in the woods at night seeking the Lord. After persisting in this for some time the Holy Spirit began to fall on the school in such power that classes could not be conducted as normal. Hugo told me that often with no more said than the blessing on the food at breakfast, the Spirit would fall on them and hours later they would all be on the floor, crying out to God and repenting of their sins. Breakfast was cold, lunch was not cooked, morning classes were not conducted. Teachers were often unable to teach the material that they had prepared.
One would think that after 25 or more years of work with only minimal fruit that a Pentecostal denomination would welcome an out pouring of the Spirit. What was their response to this activity? The school leaders met together to decide how to handle this disruptive influence, they suspended classes and sent all the students home for vacation a month early. The leaders again met and decided to inform the ringleaders of this move of the Spirit that they were not welcome to return to the school. Hugo, Celsio and two others whos names I am not sure of were expelled from the school, not because the leadership believed that the move of the Spirit was spurious but simply because it was causing a disruptive influence in the school and classes needed to be held without interruption. The four young friends met together in one of their homes and began to seek the Lord as they wept over the betrayal and the confusion that they felt because of it.
When classes started up again, four more friends, when they found out that the other four had been expelled, left the school and joined the others at the house. They began to pray and ask the Lord to show them a Bible School that they could attend. The word the Lord gave them was, “Search the scriptures and find a Bible school and I will let you attend one.” They took up the challenge dividing the whole Bible into eight equal parts and began to read. At the end of that time they had found only “the sons of the prophets,” which seemed to them as some kind of school but they concluded that it was only marginally successful. After they reported this back to the Lord he told them, “Now go through the gospels and discover how I trained my disciples.”
They thoroughly studied the record of Jesus’ teachings and activities and isolated four things that Jesus did to train his disciples.
1. He invited them to follow him as he went from place to place preaching, teaching, healing the sick and expelling demons.
2. He taught them in private, the details of the kingdom of God.
3. He allowed the disciples to do the things that he did while he watched and he later corrected their mistakes.
4. He sent them out to do what he did without supervision and to train others to do the same.
After the eight students had agreed on this they presented it before the Lord and He then told them to do the same as He had done. They began to evangelize the lost and hold meetings in the large home where they all lived, prayed and studied the Word together. Out of the ones who were coming to the Lord they singled out ones who demonstrated a calling and clear hunger for God. They invited them to forsake all and come and live in the house to be trained for full time ministry. They prayed together daily, studied the Bible in an inductive fashion and went out in groups to do evangelism. As the Holy Spirit showed them the time they encouraged the disciples to pray over the map and to be open to the Spirit to send them out to plant other congregations in different cities. They began to send out apostolic teams to different cities to plant congregations. They always first found a large house where the team could live together and hold meetings. What started in the living room spread and grew to several hundred congregations in Argentina and other parts of Latin America. [2]
It has been said that the worst opposers of a new move of the Spirit of God are those who participated in the last move. Those who are leaders in the Body of Christ need to be mindful of this tendency. I won’t venture any guesses as to why this is so but we must avoid this temptation or face the possibility that we ourselves might be in opposition to God! Just because we don’t understand what they are doing or “it's not the way we have always done it,” these excuses will not hold water before the throne of judgment.
Another example is the “Jesus People Movement” of the 1970’s but I think the two examples above are sufficient to give us the idea.
Another thing I have learned over the years I have walked with Jesus is that, while I have seen many occurrences where God has given a man or woman a vision, an idea, a plan that worked as far as producing growth, they have often written books to help others do the same thing, supposing that what has worked for them will work for others. The sad fact is that these ideas seldom if ever work in other places in the same way they work for the original person or group and often cause more confusion, harm and division than actual help. One of the reasons for this situation is that God sees the process of seeking His face, receiving His plan and the implementation of that plan as equally important components. If one adopts the vision of another, supposing it will work for him, he is bypassing important steps in the process.
The apostle Paul said; “For of Him and through Him and to Him are all things, to whom be glory forever. Amen.” (Romans 11:36)
This means that everything we do for Him must not only find its origin in Him but also find the “how to” the implementation and process and ultimately return to Him in glory to the Son of God.
Another flawed presupposition is the assumption that all God is after is growth and numerical success. Since most of these movements are launched by evangelists they tend to pay little attention to discipling the people that they lead to the Lord and less to leading them into a deeper relationship with Him. I am convinced that Jesus is seriously interested in drawing people into profound relationships with Himself wherein their lives are dramatically changed. In the last few years it has become increasingly clear to me the intensity of Jesus’ desire for fellowship with his people. Although there seems to be few believers that are truly interested in pressing past traditional boundaries to enter into deeper communion with the Lord there is a growing minority who are exploring different spiritual traditions trying to find wisdom leading to deeper communion with Christ and also with one another.
One positive sign is the emergence of new monastic communities springing up in different nations. They may be small in number but there is life in some of them. People through them are being drawn into ever deepening relationship with the Lord and discovering the power of true fellowship (koinonia).
Later we will speak about some of these:
God’s enablement in your pursuit of Him
Pablo
[1] W.T. Stead; The Story of The Welch Revival. pp.55-56 Quoted by Richard Riss in A Survey of 20th Century Revival Movements in North America
[2] For further reading on the Argentine revival read, Secrets of The Argentine Revival; by R. Edward Miller (available in Spanish) you will find my version of it differs in some details from this book but I got my version directly from Hugo and Celsio Contreras and will stick with that. The book is an interesting read.
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